You should demand read-only SNMP access to the CPE.

That's what I was hoping for. The Comcast support people did not offer me that kind of option. It's possible that such an option exists, but I don't know how to reach it.

The Comcast support people just said I should install McAfee Suite and use its bandwidth monitor utility (ignoring the fact that it would only work for one computer).

I missed this one comment originally. In many European cities (or even whole countries), Football clubs don't need TV at all for popularity. They were filling stadiums long before TVs were widespread in those countries. The same argument is valid for popular sports and teams in the US and Canada.

Nmap is your friend.

Ah. Verizon FiOS routers just operate a web server on standard port 80. It's as simple as pointing a web browser at the ip address of the router.

Except their routers are awful. Too high a failure rate, and for some reason they route their guide data and VOD through it, so when I took it out of my setup, the one FIOS box I have no longer gets any guide data (my main TV uses cablecards, which don't get VOD anyway).

I've dealt with a couple ISPs who give you routers/modems with little to no options in their admin screens. It's really annoying. I've even seen one that a) only used WEP, and b) did not allow you to change the router's login info. Incredible.

ISTR getting a modem/router for a BT business line a few years ago that didn't have any user acessible management options. The engineer came along and installed it, gave us the list of IP addresses, tested one PC and then buggered off.

The Efficient Networks 5861, actually had quite a nice CLI once you hacked into it after the engineer left. I still have a couple of them sat in a box in the loft

Yes, that was the one. Never needed to do anything with it though. All the IP addresses were public so there were no firewalls (other than the ones on the machines) or port forwarding to set up.

That would be good if it wasn't for the fact that quite a few home routers have a screwed up SNMP implementation.

If you queried the transfer counters on older Speedtouch routers, you'd get a weird value back. It would increment if you downloaded/uploaded but the actual value it increased by would have little to no relation to the amount you actually transferred. I worked around it by basically scraping the data out of the telnet CLI.

I've had similar issues with Netgear routers as well but they were usually unreliable in other ways as well which meant them getting binned.

All of this effort is to get line stats into MRTG.